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Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review.
The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers.
Currently there are 1918 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search
is a search of the text of the review.

I wish I had read this book 20 years ago. When the first edition was
published I had recently graduated with a Maths degree whose computing
content was negligible and whose software engineering content was nil. I
then had to learn software engineering on the job and this would have
been much easier had I had a general overview, such as this book provides.

The book is split into five sections. The first is an introduction,
which covers the problems of software development and the need for
software engineering. The second covers project management topics,
planning, scheduling, tracking, SQA and SCM. The largest section describes
the traditional structured techniques; analysis, architectural and
detailed design, UI design, testing strategies and techniques. A section
on the corresponding OO techniques follows. The final section covers
a selection of advanced topics, such as formal methods, client/server,
CASE and web development.

Clearly a single volume on such a large subject cannot go into great
detail. It will not turn you into an expert on any of the topics, but
will allow you to understand what the experts are doing and why. When
you are ready to learn more about a topic, you will find a comprehensive
bibliography and links to other resources.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who needs a single-volume
introduction to Software Engineering in the real world. It gives a
well-written, pragmatic coverage of most mainstream topics. I cannot
say from personal experience whether it will be relevant to an academic
course, but I would certainly hope so and if not, then it should be
viewed as a source of remedial education. UK members may well prefer
the European adaptation by Darrel Ince, which provides more coverage of
European standards and which is also a lot cheaper.